“This feels weirder than normal,” Erika said as they blazed down the streets of Chicago.

  Carter bending time wasn’t usually all that apparent. The effect gradually fell off as physical distance increased, leaving a rather large bubble around him where people could get more time per time, thus accomplish more, move faster, or otherwise just experience time a little faster than normal.

  From her perspective, nothing normally felt different either. She could drive the speed limit from her relative view and simply arrive sooner than should have been possible. Given the gradual falloff, she couldn’t really tell where that bubble ended.

  Normally.

  Right now, Erika sat on edge, gripping the steering wheel, almost afraid to even speak for fear that a slight twitch of her arm might fling them into another car wreck three states over. The effect Carter enacted wasn’t quite as drastic as what she had seen The Fixer do at the motel with Delilah, but it was a lot closer to that than she thought was possible.

  “I’m concentrating,” Carter eventually responded. “Don’t talk to me.”

  That was another difference from normal; Carter had never had to focus, especially not to the point of requiring silence. Once he bent time, time was bent, and that was that.

  Erika didn’t have a clue how he was accomplishing this and, frankly, she didn’t care at the moment. The more he concentrated, the sooner this would be over. Well, from an outside perspective, anyway. From her point of view, they had been driving for about twenty minutes, but they would still arrive at their destination only five minutes after having left Varn’s.

  Carter’s presence made time a bit confusing.

  “Almost there,” Erika said, frowning at her phone. The GPS map was freaking out a bit more than it usually did, but she knew roughly where their destination was.

  Across the river and a fair bit south from the Sears Tower, the various rails that ran through Chicago all congregated at the railroad yard. If he wasn’t concentrating, Carter could probably tell her exactly how many trains passed through every day, but Erika would guess upward of sixty—it was one of the busiest railways in the Midwest, if not the busiest.

  The meeting point was just the address, but she glanced off the overpass where a train was peeling off the main route, she spotted a familiar van alone in the parking lot—The Puppet’s enchanted van they had used to escape the hotel.

  Erika pulled into the parking lot and stopped the car a fair distance away from the van, not wanting Carter to get too close to any possible danger. “We’re here,” she said, earning a strained sigh from her brother.

  The movement of the train, cars on the road, and even a handful of pedestrians all started speeding up relative to Erika’s perspective, returning to normal. Erika eyed a few people in particular, workers from the yard apparently on a smoke break. They were all looking in her direction, or the direction of the van, but didn’t look like they got paid enough to care about the newcomers.

  “Stay here, take a break, but be ready… we might have to leave in a hurry,” Erika said, leaving her keys in the ignition and her engine on. “If anything looks even mildly dangerous—”

  “I know,” Carter groaned, sounding exhausted. “I’ll slip into the future until after you’ve already dealt with the trouble.”

  “Good boy.” Erika smiled as she ruffled his messy hair.

  Carter swatted her away. “Not a dog.”

  “I’ll be back in a minute. Hopefully,” she said, sending a look at the van. It was definitely the enchanted van; she could almost feel the film around it from across the parking lot.

  None of The Puppet stood outside, waiting for her. It was just a lonesome van in the middle of a mostly empty lot. Knowing they were under a time crunch, Erika hurried over anyway, figuring someone would be inside. She sent The Strategist a text, letting him know that she had arrived, just in case they weren’t looking in her direction.

  A dozen feet from the van, Erika slowed. The windows of the van were tinted to the point of being completely opaque, made even worse by the dark of late evening. The Puppet was in a hurry, once they noticed her, she figured they would rush out to meet her halfway.

  Yet, there was no movement. The windows remained sealed, the doors stayed closed, and the van didn’t even shake a little like people inside were moving about.

  Erika stopped, her boots crunching on the gravel even as the sound of the train rolling by drowned out all the distant noise of the city. An unpleasant feeling welled in the pit of her stomach that something had gone wrong in the short time since receiving the message to meet here and actually arriving.

  A vibration in her hand made her look down to her phone. The incoming message wasn’t from The Stalker, The Strategist, or The Warrior.

  The Prescient sent her three simple letters that sent a jolt of fresh adrenaline rushing through her veins.

  RUN

  Erika’s heart hammered in her chest. She didn’t hesitate—she spun on her heel, boots skidding on the gravel as she sprinted back toward her pickup. She didn’t even bother to look back at the van. Erika didn’t know if this was a betrayal from The Puppet, a trap set by The Eclipse, or something else entirely, but if The Prescient got a vision, she had to listen.

  The pickup was only a dozen yards away, but it felt like a mile. The air around her seemed to thicken, as if the world itself were drawing in a heavy breath.

  Carter was in the pickup, visible against the yellowed lights in the parking lot, but he wasn’t paying attention to her. His eyes were glued out the opposite window.

  The smoking workers on break outside the railyard building weren’t smoking anymore. All five of them were on the ground, kneeling with their arms raised and white masks covering the upper halves of their faces.

  “Shit,” Erika hissed as one of the cultists drew a curving, wavy dagger from the inside of his navy coveralls. He held it aloft, spoke something that Erika didn’t catch, and plunged it down toward his own throat.

  The blood spurted from the wound as he wrenched his arm, tearing the hole wider. The other four simply sat, some being splattered without flinching, and continued to pray. Even as the first collapsed into a twitching heap, they remained with their arms aloft, as if asking the moon itself to come down and bless them.

  The largest of the globs of blood never struck the ground, clinging to the night sky like lightbulbs, faintly glowing an ominous red. They began swirling together, spiraling into an unending abyss, just as Erika reached the door to her truck.

  An arm, spindly and lanky, thrust out from the red spiral, coated in a thin sheen of blood that gleamed in the yellow lights. It thrashed around, twitching and grasping at random, until its fingers grazed over the shoulder of one of the cultists. With a wrenching yank, it dragged him back toward the spiral until his face collided right against the twisting of the nether arms.

  He screamed, chanting prayer broken as his clothes and skin started grinding away against the rotating spiral.

  Given what Erika knew about those masked men and their resilience against pain, those screams, and their abrupt stop, chilled her pulsing blood.

  Erika threw herself into the driver’s seat, grasped the shift stick, and jammed it into drive. “Carter!” she shouted. “Bend time as much—”

  Just as she slammed her foot against the pedal, the rear of her pickup lurched. She flicked her eyes to the rearview mirror just in time to watch a ribbon of tattoos form in the air, followed swiftly by the flesh of the nude woman. She was bent, hunched forward with a wide grin on her face.

  Erika pressed the pedal to the floor, but they weren’t moving. The woman lifted the back of the truck just enough to keep the rear tires off the ground.

  A second curdling scream echoed across the parking lot, penetrating the closed windows of her truck. Another arm had another cultist grasped by the hair, pulling his face directly into the spiral—the much larger spiral. Even as she watched the new cultist get torn apart like someone forced into the blades of a blender, the spiraling, bloody arms stretched wider and wider, closing around in a dome, growing large enough to encompass half the parking lot.

  With two cultists blended to pulp, and two cultists still within easy grasping distance of those arms jutting out from the center of the spiral, it didn’t take a Genius-class being to guess what their plan was.

  They were going to cut off the outside world and trap her inside this space.

  They were going to trap Carter.

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  Could they make a run for it? Not likely, especially not with the woman right outside. The moment they tried to run, she would be on them.

  “I liked it better when our parents did it,” Carter said, his voice devoid of panic or stress. Erika looked to find him just staring out the window, more disappointed than anything.

  Erika didn’t know what to think of that comment, and she didn’t have time to consider either—just glancing at him was costing time that she did not have no matter how much Carter could twist it.

  “Carter,” Erika said in a firm, demanding tone, forcing him to look at her. “I’m going to get that woman off the truck. You get climb into the driver seat and you floor it until you’re out of here. Understand?”

  “I don’t know how to drive.”

  “You know enough to get out of here. It doesn’t matter if you wreck the truck. No arguing. You get out. You call Leslie, and you stay safe. I—” Another scream started up, cascading over the gravely asphalt. The spiraling arms were already stretching further, reaching toward the far end of the lot.

  They were out of time.

  Baseball bat in hand, Erika burst from the pickup, boots pounding the gravel as she charged the tattooed woman. The air was thick with the metallic tang of blood—it almost felt like small, misty droplets were sticking to her face. She could feel the pressure of the red barrier growing, the cultists’ screams echoing off the asphalt. Erika didn’t know exactly what they were doing, but she couldn’t worry about that right now. The naked woman was her biggest obstacle at the moment—Carter’s biggest obstacle.

  The woman barely had time to react before Erika swung, channeling every ounce of her will into the blow. The tattoos were the woman’s weakness, but Erika didn’t have time to aim. She connected with a sickening crack, with enough force to shatter concrete, hoping it would be enough. The woman flew backwards, slammed into the asphalt, and tumbled to a dead stop several feet from the truck.

  The moment the still-spinning tires hit the ground, the pickup lurched forward. Erika turned, more concerned with Carter than herself or the woman, watching Carter as he took his sweet time scrambling in the cab. For a brief moment, she considered chasing after it to hop in the back, escaping as well.

  The woman staggered back to her feet, swaying back and forth as she stood. Erika’s thoughts turned from escape to securing Carter’s escape as she turned back to face the woman. “Had a bad fall?” Erika taunted, donning a cocky grin even as she took a few steps to block the woman’s line of sight to the slowly rolling truck.

  She hoped Carter hurried and figured out which pedal was for the gas; did he actually not know anything about cars?

  “Not looking so hot there,” she lied, trying to keep the woman focused on her.

  In truth, the woman looked great for someone who, last Erika saw, had several broken bones—Erika and The Fixer working together at the motel might well have killed her for real if not for the interference of the reality guardian. She now stood, looking entirely unbroken; aside from a little blood dripping from her nose, even her face was whole despite Erika’s hit.

  Her tattoos were her weakness and her face only had two sharp lines running down her cheeks from her eyes, with trails leading off around the sides of her head. Erika had hit directly in the center of her face, not aiming, just trying to get her off the truck as soon as possible.

  Hearing the engine of her pickup grind into gear behind her let Erika breathe a small sigh of relief. Carter must have finally found his way to the driver’s seat.

  The woman stuck out her long tongue, swiping it across the blood smeared over her upper lip.

  Erika took her eyes off the naked woman for just a moment, wishing she had a gun or something that could take out the last cultist at range. There was still one left, and if he didn’t get pulled into the twisting blender of a barrier, it might not expand further. She had no idea where her gun was, having lost it a while back, and didn’t know of any other firearms besides the ones Leslie used, and she didn’t know where he kept those.

  A low, throaty growl and a flash of movement made Erika dodge without even seeing the threat. She had gone through this song and dance enough that she was starting to develop an instinct for it; any unknown movement meant she needed to move.

  The woman lunged, impossibly fast, with her mouth split in a grin that was all teeth and hunger. Erika twisted, the bat in her hands vanishing as she pulled it from her jacket’s opposite pocket. The clumsy, left-handed blow barely knocked against the woman’s elbow, but it was enough to turn the lunge into a tumble—somersaulting before springing onto her feet once again. She spun on her heel to face Erika, transitioning directly into another swiping lunge.

  Ready this time, Erika squared up and swung, aiming low.

  Some of Leslie’s words stuck out to her: in a situation like this, she needed to first identify a victory condition. Aiming and swinging wildly wasn’t going to get her out of here. She needed to put the woman down, if only temporarily, so that she could escape. Given the woman’s resilience, that meant she needed to break her legs beyond the ability to move.

  Her legs just so happened to be the most tattooed part of her body.

  The bat connected, firm and precise, hitting her thigh just below her hip. Erika heard the snap and saw the bend, and tried to twist out of the way before the woman’s arms could clasp hold of her.

  A long, sharpened fingernail snagged Erika’s jacket, dragging her to the ground as the woman collapsed. Unconcerned with her leg, the woman’s fingers snapped out, latching onto Erika’s arms, even as she twisted like a contortionist to wrap her good leg around Erika’s waist.

  They hit the ground, a tangle of limbs, with Erika on top but held while the woman just grinned up at her.

  One final scream pierced the air. Erika whipped her head back to find the last cultist being dragged into the dead center of the whirling arms of death. Six separate hands emerging from the maelstrom grasped and clawed, tearing him apart even as the blender ripped him to shreds.

  Snapping her gaze back with clenched teeth, Erika slammed her elbow down, aiming for a tattoo on the side of the woman’s head.

  “Yo?u? a?r?e? h?e?r?e? no?w,” the woman leered, voice layered and wrong, unconcerned with Erika’s blow even though her eye popped from her broken socket, hanging from the sinew of the optic nerve that led back into the woman’s skull.

  Erika broke out of the woman’s grip with ease, and immediately slammed the butt of her bat down, but her bat passed through, striking the ground as the woman’s flesh faded and her tattoos, left behind for a moment longer, shimmered away.

  Fissuring the ground with another strike, Erika shouted out in frustration. A stinging burn flushed through her shoulder where the woman had snagged her. It didn’t feel broken, but it wasn’t moving the way Erika wanted. Dislocated? Teeth clenched, Erika grasped hold of her arm as she staggered to her feet, looking around for whatever threat the woman had left her with.

  Large, red globs of copper-scented blood dripped from overhead. It fell first in a light pattering rain before the intensity ramped up, thundering downward in a monsoon. It spread across the ground, soaking into the asphalt.

  Just as quickly as it came, the rain ceased, fading into a few lingering drips. The blood on the ground drained, absorbed into the parking lot.

  Or… rather, the surface left behind wasn’t the same as the parking lot asphalt. A smooth, black cobblestone spread out before her, stretching far, far further than the railyard parking lot, with short walls like an old-fashioned stone bridge set up where the actual rails had once been. There no whirling blood barrier swirled about anymore, no grasping arms, and no naked woman. A thick, red-tinged fog obscured most of the distant sights, but she could see far enough to tell that this was not Chicago anymore.

  The Warrior’s enchanted van still sat there, but her gaze moved further along the wide bridge, where her pickup had collided with the short barrier.

  Erika broke into a run, wincing at the burn in her arm that flared with every step. She skipped past the enchanted van and swept around the side of her pickup. It didn’t look like there was much damage—a black streak of skid marks marred the cobblestone where Carter had clearly tried to stop, and, judging by the curve in the tracks, he must have tried to swerve to the side to avoid that blood barrier.

  Ripping open the door, Erika sighed, relieved, as she found Carter gripping the steering wheel with white knuckles, foot pressed as hard as he could manage against the brake pedal.

  “Sorry,” he said, not even turning his head.

  “Don’t… It’s okay,” Erika said, starting to reach for him, only to stop as she saw her blood covered hands. She was soaked, wet and sticky everywhere. “Maybe it’s better that you didn’t get out,” she said, trying to reason with herself. “At least I know you aren’t in their hands.”

  If they did to Carter what they had done to Leah…

  Erika ground her teeth, then pulled a packet of wet wipes from her armory’s medical bag—she still had access to that, at least. There weren’t enough wet wipes to matter, but she could at least wipe her face. A random shirt from her armory helped… or maybe it just smeared everything around worse.

  “Stick close to me, understand?”

  “I’m not dumb.”

  “I know,” Erika said, trying to keep the tension out of her voice for his sake. “I just want to make sure. I don’t know where we are. Have you checked your phone?”

  Carter shook his head. “If I let go, what if it goes over the edge?”

  Erika tossed a wipe on the ground, pulling another one out. “The shifter, move it up two notches—yep, just like that. Very good.”

  “I crashed your truck.”

  “It’s okay. It doesn’t matter,” Erika reassured him, then slowly glanced aside. The enchanted van was just sitting there.

  Was it a trap?

  “We might have a better option anyway,” she said, holding out her mostly cleaned hand for Carter to take.

  He eyed her hand warily, but accepted without too much hesitation.

  “You let me know if you see anything, okay?”

  “Mist, black stone—”

  “You know what I mean,” Erika said before he could start.

  “Sorry, I’m… nervous.”

  Same, Erika thought, though she didn’t say it. For Carter’s sake, she would put on the strong, older-sister face, even if it was just a mask at the moment.

  The van’s driver-side door was unlocked, thankfully, though Erika almost wished it wasn’t.

  Michael sat in the seat, slumped onto the steering wheel with his head twisted a quarter too far.

  “Close your eyes,” Erika urged, keeping Carter just outside of view on the other side of the door.

  “I thought I was supposed to be on watch.”

  “Yes, well, you aren’t supposed to watch this,” Erika said as she stepped onto the van’s footstep. She wished she could be a little more respectful about rifling though his pockets, but this didn’t seem like the time or place to be careful and she needed resources.

  Poor Michael had a wallet, three separate sets of keys, and, perhaps most importantly, a handgun along with three backup magazines, all of which were loaded with a rainbow of bullets.

  After a quick glance around, making sure nobody was attacking them, Erika grasped hold of Michael’s old army outlet jacket and slowly lowered him onto the ground. Him being dead like this probably meant that The Puppet hadn’t betrayed Erika, but rather got ambushed themselves.

  It was her fault. Everyone she interacted with was in danger.

  Forcing the guilt away, Erika quickly checked for any other unfortunate occupants, and about sighed in relief when she found none. Taking him by the hand, she helped Carter into the van and got him settled before letting him open his eyes. “This is our ride now,” she said, fumbling with the sets of keys as she took over the driver’s seat.

  Carter, sliding into the passenger seat, raised an eyebrow in her direction. “Ride to where? You don’t even know where we are.”

  That was a good point, but they seemed to be on a long, wide bridge of sorts. The mist made it impossible to see either end of it, but something had to be somewhere.

  Erika might not know where they were, how they got here, how to escape, or anything, but she still had guesses as to what kind of place they were in. She had been somewhere similar before, back when The Fixer and Leah had been captured by The Mummy.

  One direction or the other was bound to have chains.

  Finding the key that fit in the ignition, Erika started the smooth and silent engine. They had little choice but to pick a direction and start moving.